Snowden would be bad for business. Germany is a major exporter. Having Snowden on the agenda at every intergovernmental conference would be a barrier to getting deals signed. The only reason the Germans (and other countries) sent troops to Afghanistan was to keep their export markets to the United States open.

Snowden would be a lightning rod for political activism in Germany. Remember they have political groups such as the pirate party there and in the run up to the election, his presence would make an issue of the German governments own activities especially on behalf of the corporations against its own citizens.

Unlike some hype-ridden stuff of late, here’s a rather interesting paper detailing how researchers were able to get a 4096-bit key off a computer by listening to the sound of its CPU decrypting something, using a mobile phone. Fascinating stuff (to me anyway).

Unlike some hype-ridden stuff of late, here’s a rather interesting paper detailing how researchers were able to get a 4096-bit key off a computer by listening to the sound of its CPU decrypting something, using a mobile phone. Fascinating stuff (to me anyway).

data leakage of this sort is not limited to the acoustic realm.
They also tried measuring fluctuations in the power consumption of their laptops, by monitoring the voltage of the power supply between the power brick and the laptop power socket.
They didn’t get the accuracy needed to do full key recovery, but they were able to perform their key distinguishing attack, so exploitable data is almost certainly leaked by your power supply, too.
The authors further claim that changes in the electrical potential of the laptop’s chassis - which can be measured at a distance if any shielded cables (e.g. USB, VGA, HDMI) are plugged in, as the shield is connected to the chassis - can give results at least as accurate as the ones they achieved acoustically.

This discovery actually puts a dent in the theory that the NSA were relying on this weak random number generator to crack SSL encrypted traffic. If they had been so reliant, they would have spotted early on that OpenSSL implementations weren’t vunerable despite including the flawed generator. Yet they never reported the bug to OpenSSL, even though we are told it should have been in their interests to do so.

So can we conclude that either the NSA have more than one ‘backdoor’ into SSL and so they didn’t need Dual EC DRBG working in OpenSSL, or the rumours about them exploiting Dual EC weren’t true to begin with?

Certainly the tech companies felt worse off. In November, the German newsweekly Der Spiegel—another recipient of Snowden leaks—described an NSA/GCHQ exploit that seemed tailor-made to erode trust. In an attempt to gain access to the Brussels-based telecommunications firm Belgacom, the agencies set up bogus versions of sites like Slashdot and LinkedIn. When employees tried to access the sites from corporate computers, their requests were diverted to the phony replicas, which the spies used to inject malware into their machines.

Using considerable understatement, LinkedIn’s general counsel, Erika Rottenberg, says, “We are not happy that our intellectual property is being used in that way.” It is not hard to see why. If foreign customers can’t know whether they are using a legitimate social network or a spy-created fake, they are liable to log off altogether.

For years, companies from espionage-happy countries like China have been spurned by overseas buyers who didn’t trust their products. Now it’s America’s turn. And that is already having an impact on young companies looking to grow internationally. “Right now, our ad business is 95 percent US-based,” says David Karp, founder of Tumblr. “As we start to take this business overseas, we’re running up against stricter EU laws, particularly on privacy, as part of their reaction to US practices on the Internet.”

The DuckDuckGo search engine, which encrypts each search by default and does not profile its users, has experienced a dramatic increase in site traffic – almost doubling since details of the spying scandal were revealed.

**Toronto woman is shocked after she was denied entry into the U.S.
because she had been hospitalized for clinical depression.

Welcome to the future folks.**

Most Canadian hospitals use American software for medical records so they could well be compromised. Ironically, at the same time, confidentiality has become an obsession with hospitals, with new policies rolling out all the time. It would appear that privacy is seen more now as a local thing, an expectation that neighbours and relatives won’t see your records but that govts. and large companies are above such rules.

The DuckDuckGo search engine, which encrypts each search by default and does not profile its users, has experienced a dramatic increase in site traffic – almost doubling since details of the spying scandal were revealed.

But his next constituency newsletter can say something along the lines of:

In 2013, I called for a clamp down on online black markets and illegal transactions.
During the course of the year, the Silk Road and Sheep Marketplace site were closed, and various internet ne’erdowells were arrested.